The shelter that the city could offer refugees was like streams of water to a panting deer. Charity lay at the heart of Calvin’s vision. Even a Jew, if he needed assistance, might be given it. ‘Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.’33 The readiness of Geneva to offer succour to refugees was, for Calvin, a critical measure of his success. He never doubted that many Genevans profoundly resented the influx of impecunious foreigners into their city. But nor did he ever question his responsibility to educate them anew. The achievement of Geneva in hosting vast numbers of refugees was to prove a momentous one. The example of charity that it provided; the reassurance that a godly society was indeed possible; the comfort offered to persecuted exiles that there was a purpose to their suffering, and that everything in life was shaped by divine intention: all were topics discussed whenever refugees made it home. ‘Calvinists’ they were called by their enemies, a term of abuse that was also a tribute. Loyal to God’s purposes as they understood them, those inspired by Calvin would prove themselves ready to follow his teachings even at the utmost cost: to abandon their past; to leave behind their homes; to travel, if they had to, the ends of the earth.
The Clearing Mist
One night in 1581, a group of men carried the corpse of an executed robber through the dark streets of Shrewsbury. Ahead of them, on a hill overlooking the river Severn, rose one of the tallest spires in England. Founded back in the age of Athelstan, the church of St Mary’s was where, during the turbulent centuries that preceded the English conquest of Wales, some ten miles to the west, a succession of papal legates had based themselves. But those days were history. What Protestants had come to call ‘popery’ was banished from England. The Catholic Queen Mary had died in 1558, and her half-sister, Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, now sat on the English throne. Over one of the church doors her coat of arms had been carved, and a verse from the Bible: ‘Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.’34 Not every taint of popery, though, had yet been erased. In the churchyard there stood a giant cross. That it was much cherished in Shrewsbury only made the task of destroying it all the more urgent. Working under cover of darkness, the party of body-snatchers set to pulling it down. Then, once the cross had been demolished, they dug a grave where it had formerly stood, and slung in the corpse. Better an executed criminal than a monument to popery.
‘A perpetual forge of idols.’35 So Calvin had described the human mind. This conviction, that fallen mortals were forever susceptible to turning their backs on God, to polluting the pure radiance of his commands, to erecting in his very sanctuary a golden calf, was the dread that had constantly shadowed all his reforms. Now, a decade and more after his death, his warnings against superstition had won a readership far beyond the limits of Geneva. In London, where more editions of his works were published than anywhere else, printers struggled to keep pace with demand. One enterprising editor had even commissioned a compilation of his greatest hits. Nor was it only in England that Calvin had become, almost overnight, a best-seller. The reverberations of his influence had reached as far afield as Scotland – a land freely acknowledged by its own nobility to lie ‘almost beyond the limits of the human race’.36 In 1559, the preaching of John Knox, an exile returned from Geneva, had inspired an eruption of godly vandalism across the kingdom. One congregation, after listening to Knox inveigh against idolatry, had promptly set to dismantling the local cathedral. Other bands of enthusiasts had incinerated abbeys, chopped down the orchards of friaries, and pulled up flowers in monastery gardens. A year later – after a short but vicious civil war, and a vote by the Scottish parliament for a reformation of the country’s Church that was unmistakably Calvinist in flavour – the ambition to rout idolatry had been set on an official footing. There was now no relic of papist superstition in Britain so remote that it might not be liable for legal destruction. Whether to islands lashed by Atlantic gales, where Irish monks, back in the age of Columbanus, had raised crosses amid the heather and the rock, or to the wildest reaches of Wales, where moss-covered chapels stood guard over gushing springs, workmen armed with sledge-hammers made their way, and did their work. The reach of magistrates inspired by Calvin had become a long one indeed.
Why, then, in the churchyard of St Mary’s, had there been any need for the clandestine destruction of its cross? It had been done by men who feared that time was running out. Across the Channel, the forces of darkness, hell-bound and predacious, were drowning famous Christian cities in the blood of the elect. In 1572, on the feast-day of Saint Bartholomew, thousands of Protestants had been butchered on the streets of Paris. In other cities too, throughout Calvin’s native France, there had been a general slaughter of his followers. New martyrs had been made in Lyon. Meanwhile, in the Low Countries, an even more murderous conflict was being fought. Its cities, brilliant and rich, had long been incubators of every shade of Protestant. As early as 1523, Charles V had hanged two monks in Antwerp on a charge of heresy, and levelled their monastery. The king of Münster, John of Leiden, had been Dutch. Over the course of the succeeding decades, more Protestants had been put to death in the Low Countries than anywhere else. Yet still the ranks of the godly there had continued to grow. Insurgents against a monarchy with all the wealth of the New World at its back, many had found in Calvin’s teachings a life-altering reassurance: that to be outnumbered did not mean being wrong. To take up arms against tyranny was no sin, but rather a duty. God would look after his own. If the toppling of a cross in an English market town could hardly compare as a feat with the successful defiance of the most formidable military machine in Christendom, then it was no less godly for that. The loyalty shown by the Dutch rebels to the will of the divine; their readiness to risk their fortunes and their lives; the courage and the intelligence that they brought to their fight against idolatry: here were inspirations to anyone with eyes to see.